“Let us assume I had an extraordinarily good memory, I would never have written anything down.”

– Hannah Arendt, 1964

“Let us assume I had an extraordinarily good memory, I would never have written anything down,” Hannah Arendt once said in an interview. We are lucky that Arendt actually did not have that kind of memory. Had she never written anything down, all her thoughts, in the moment she died, would have vanished from the world as though they had never existed.

Thomas Wild is an Assistant Professor of German Studies and a Hannah Arendt Center Research Associate at Bard College. He's published and edited several books on Hannah Arendt. His further research interests include contemporary German literature, film, poetics, and multilingualism. He is co-editor-in-chief preparing the first critical edition of Hannah Arendt's Complete Writings in English and German.

Arendt’s The Life of the Mind influences my answer. As an educator, my job is to prompt students to think—to have them become two-in-one (in Socratic terms) or to have soundless dialogues within themselves (in the Platonic sense). One way to accomplish that is to structure courses as a conversation between philosophers. In my American political thought course, for instance, I teach lessons on the liberal John Rawls and the conservative Leo Strauss. An integral part of that particular unit is for students to enact a conversation between those two figures in their own minds.

Nicholas Tampio is Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University. He is the author of Kantian Courage (Fordham University Press, 2012) and is currently writing an article on democracy and education standards.

“[W]henever I transcend the limits of my own life span and begin to reflect on this past, judging it, and this future, forming projects of the will, thinking ceases to be a politically marginal activity. And such reflections will inevitably arise in political emergencies.”

---Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (Thinking)

There have been several new studies on and discussions about Adolf Eichmann lately. In them, Arendt’s name is frequently mentioned for fairly obvious reasons. Her remarks on Eichmann’s “thoughtlessness,” including her “banality of evil” and its relevance in assessing modern day atrocities, have forewarned against the consequences of totalitarianism for more than a half-century now. But some scholars, including Bettina Stangneth in her new book Eichmann Before Jerusalem, are challenging Arendt’s ideas. This gives us an opportunity to look back on Arendt’s theories and reevaluate their logic ourselves.

Kazue Koishikawa recently earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at Duquesne University. She is working on her first book, in which she explores reading the political philosophy of Arendt as a phenomenological theory of imagination, particularly in Arendt’s interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic judgment. She specializes in phenomenology and political philosophy.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

In a brilliant profile of Marilynne Robinson, whose new book Lila will be out this month, Wyatt Mason (a Senior Fellow at the Arendt Center) notes that Robinson thinks that fear dominates our contemporary condition; fear, she says, is the root of a cultural cynicism: "I hate to say it, but I think a default posture of human beings is fear." Robinson comes to speak about fear in answer to Mason's question: "What do you think people should be talking about more?" Her answer: "'One of the things that bothers me,' she began, with feeling, 'is that there are prohibitions of an unarticulated kind that are culturally felt that prevent people from actually saying what they think.' From there, she raised her well-documented relationship to faith; said that students at Iowa from faith-based backgrounds seek her out; sketched the inhibition these students nonetheless feel in describing the sacred ('If you're Jewish or Catholic, you can make all the jokes about your mother or the nun, but in terms of saying on one's deathbed, "What will it mean to me that this is how I would have described myself, how does the cosmos feel as it nestles in my particular breast?" they are completely inarticulate about that'); addressed that inhibition and suggested its root ('It's as if when you describe something good, you are being deceived or are being deceptive'); offered Flannery O'Connor as an example of a religious writer who fails to describe goodness ('Her prose is beautiful, her imagination appalls me'); evoked the nature of O'Connor's failure ('There's a lot of writing about religion with a cold eye, but virtually none with a loving heart'); complained about the widespread ignorance of religion in American life; told the story of Oseola McCarty, a laundress who bequeathed most of her life savings to the University of Southern Mississippi ('[An] interviewer was talking about how McCarty took down this Bible and First Corinthians fell out of it, it had been so read. And you think, Here is this woman that, by many standards, might have been considered marginally literate, that by another standard would have been considered to be a major expert on the meaning of First Corinthians!'); suggested that McCarty's understanding of First Corinthians - in which Paul lays out the kind of communitarian behaviors upon which Christian decency might depend - reveals what it means to read a text well ('It makes you think that comprehension has an ethical content'); jumped to some reading she has been doing that has an explicit ethical content - essays by John Wycliffe, who played a crucial role in the first English translations of the Bible ('Wycliffe says that if you do not object strenuously to a superior's bad behavior, you are as bad, as guilty as he is of what happens'); and rehearsed the radical activist tradition of translating the Bible, how rendering it into English was a courageous act, a risky resistance of royal authority. ... And it was here that Robinson brought up fear: How it has come to keep us at bay from our best selves, the selves that could and should 'do something.' In her case, that 'something' has been writing. For Robinson, writing is not a craft; it is 'testimony,' a bearing witness: an act that demands much of its maker, not least of which is the courage to reveal what one loves."

Steven Heller considers cartoonist Richard McGuire's newly updated project Here, a comic set in one room over the course of many centuries: "Here is, furthermore, a meditation on 'impermanence,' which is what makes it emotionally compelling yet unsettling-as though every moment in time is preserved in some random playback mode. Structurally, everything and everyone has what McGuire calls a 'walk-on part' as the mysterious scenes go flowing by. 'If you stop to think about this, the "now" becomes heightened,' he says. 'We are so rarely "in the moment," we spend most of our time thinking of the past or worrying about the future. The "now" is the only thing that really exists. The book starts with the question, "Why did I come in here again?" Which is what I was asking myself when I started this project. It took me a long time to figure out how exactly to make this book. The book ends with a moment of recognition of the "now." The person finds the book they are looking for. Which is also my answer, I came back to this idea to make it into a book.'"

Steven Pinker suggests that, although there are lots of reasons why academics write so poorly, most it is because they are not encouraged to write well: "Fog comes easily to writers; it's the clarity that requires practice. The naïve realism and breezy conversation in classic style are deceptive, an artifice constructed through effort and skill. Exorcising the curse of knowledge is no easier. It requires more than just honing one's empathy for the generic reader. Since our powers of telepathy are limited, it also requires showing a draft to a sample of real readers and seeing if they can follow it, together with showing it to yourself after enough time has passed that it's no longer familiar and putting it through another draft (or two or three or four). And there is the toolbox of writerly tricks that have to be acquired one by one: a repertoire of handy idioms and tropes, the deft use of coherence connectors such as nonetheless and moreover, an ability to fix convoluted syntax and confusing garden paths, and much else. You don't have to swallow the rational-actor model of human behavior to see that professionals may not bother with this costly self-improvement if their profession doesn't reward it. And by and large, academe does not. Few graduate programs teach writing. Few academic journals stipulate clarity among their criteria for acceptance, and few reviewers and editors enforce it. While no academic would confess to shoddy methodology or slapdash reading, many are blasé about their incompetence at writing. Enough already. Our indifference to how we share the fruits of our intellectual labors is a betrayal of our calling to enhance the spread of knowledge. In writing badly, we are wasting each other's time, sowing confusion and error, and turning our profession into a laughingstock."

Writing about former nun Karen Armstrong's new book Fields of Blood: Religion of History and Violence, Ferdinand Mound troubles the commonly understood relationship between the two: "Armstrong argues persuasively that it is under the cumulative pressure of invasion by outsiders and internal oppression that secular grievance morphs into jihad. To use an apt but unlovely term, invented I think by Dr. Henry Kissinger, religion is 'weaponised' - how Dr. Strangelove would adore the word. After years of Israeli blockade and creeping land grabs, Yasser Arafat's entirely secular Palestine Liberation Organisation has segued into the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. Israel herself, founded as a secular haven in the teeth of the rabbis, has become a holy land after half a century of Arab encirclement. Now young men all over the Middle East, many of them originally secular and ignorant of Islam, as were the majority of the 9/11 bombers, are being hyped up by selective quotation of holy writ to commit crimes as unspeakable as, well, Samson's. Religion makes its comeback into politics in this hideous perverted form for much the same reason as it emerged in the first place - as an anguished reaction against a heartless world. Westerners lament that Islam never had a Reformation. Muslims may retort that if we had not trampled all over them, they wouldn't have needed one."

Seyla Benhabib has an excellent account of the poverty of those American critics who take to the media to denounce Hannah Arendt every time a new opportunity emerges. In doing so, she provides an excellent account of Arendt's use of Kant in her understanding of Adolf Eichmann: "Commenting on Eichmann's claim that he was 'neither a murderer nor a mass murderer,' Stangneth writes that his 'inner morality is not an idea of justice, a universal moral category, or even a kind of introspection.... Eichmann was not demanding a common human law, which could also apply to him, because he, too, was human. He was actually demanding recognition for a National Socialist dogma, according to which each people (Volk) has a right to defend itself by any means necessary, the German people most of all.' Stangneth explains that for Eichmann 'Conscience was simply the "morality of the Fatherland that dwells within" a person, which Eichmann also termed "the voice of the blood."' This recalls the famous exchange during Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem between Judge Yitzhak Raveh and the defendant about Kant's moral philosophy, which Arendt cites in 'Eichmann in Jerusalem.' She quotes Eichmann saying, 'I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws.' But Arendt notes that Eichmann's meaning perverts Kant's Categorical Imperative: Whereas 'In Kant's philosophy the source, that source was practical reason, in Eichmann's household use of him, it was the will of the Führer.' So when Arendt uses the phrase 'the inability to think' to characterize Eichmann's reduction of conscience to a 'voice of blood' and of the categorical imperative to the command of the Führer, she is taking as given the Kantian terminology, in which 'to think' means to think for oneself and to think consistently, but also from the standpoint of everyone else. The Categorical Imperative in one of its formulations says, 'Act in such a way that the principle of your actions can be a universal law for all.' Eichmann neither thought for himself nor from a universal standpoint in any Kantian sense, and Arendt returned to the relationship between thinking and moral action in several of her essays after 'Eichmann in Jerusalem.'"

In an interview at the end of the regular season, baseball fan George Will takes on the idea that baseball is somehow religious: "Part of the beauty of baseball, and sport generally, is that it doesn't mean a damn thing. It's valued for itself. Now, it can be the pursuit of excellence. It is competition tamed and made civil by rules. It is aggression channeled in a wholesome direction. These are all virtues. They tiptoe up to the point and stop well short of giving baseball meaning. It's a game. It's a very pretty, demanding, and dangerous game. I do think that baseball satisfies a longing in people, particularly urban people. There is a vestigial tribal impulse in all of us. For instance, when you get on the L and the cars begin to fill up with people wearing their Cub blue and you're all going to the same place for the same reason, for about three hours a little community exists. It disperses after three hours, but it will come back tomorrow. Daniel Patrick Moynihan talked about what he called the 'liberal expectancy.' He said that with the coming of modernity the two drivers of history, religion and ethnicity, would lose their saliency. Sport caters to this and entertains this desire for group identification. But there's nothing transcendent about baseball."

Just in case you are unable to make it to our conference, you can watch a live webcast of all the lectures and panel discussions here.

Reading: Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler

Two of Germany's most distinguished contemporary playwrights read from Discovery of America and other works.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Olin Room 102, 7:30 pm

One Day University Film School Presents: "Robot and Frank" and a Discussion with Roger Berkowitz

Robot and Frank explores the depths of friendship and even love between a robot and a man. Though the film is a comedy, the underlying questions it raises are both timely and serious. What is friendship? Can a machine love? More importantly, what happens when humans fall in love with machines?

This week on the Blog, Kazue Koishikawa discusses Arendt's conception of the self and how our thoughts, our bodies, our speech, and our love shape our existence as communal beings in the Quote of the Week. Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back to a 2012 lecture delivered by Michael McCarthy analyzing Arendt's critique of "the world alienation of modernity" in our Video Archives. In our Library feature, we appreciate Arendt's collection of Lichtenberg's works. And Roger Berkowitz reflects on the decline of and how we might reinvigorate America's exceptionalism in the Weekend Read.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

If you want an example of why distrust of American institutions is at epidemic proportions, listen to the investigative report of the New York Federal Reserve based on secret tapes made by one of their Senior Bank Examiners, Carmen Segarra. Segarra, a lawyer with impeccable credentials, was hired by the Federal Reserve after the financial crisis as part of an effort to bring in new personnel who were more willing to stand up to the banks they were charged with regulating. Segarra's story is told jointly in a hour-long radio show by Ira Glass on "This American Life" and in an investigative article by ProPublica's Jake Bernstein. Here is one exchange between Bernstein, Segarra, and David Beim, author of a once secret report commissioned by the Federal Reserve to study why the Fed had failed to adequately regulate banks in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.

David Beim: So I could just read the fear of speaking up list of quotations. And it goes like this: "Don't want to be too far outside from where management is thinking. The organization does not encourage thinking outside the box. After you get shot down a couple of times, you tend not to go there anymore. Until I know what my boss thinks, I don't want to tell you."

Jake Bernstein: According to Beim's report, this culture of fear paralyzed the Fed in the years leading up to the financial crisis and prevented it from taking action. It's not that the Fed regulators didn't notice the problems accumulating in the financial system that eventually brought it down.

David Beim: They were aware of those problems coming. There were lengthy presentations on subjects like that within the organization. It's just that none of those meetings ever ended with anyone saying, "and therefore let's take the following steps right now."

Jake Bernstein: Carmen was used to the private sector, where she says meetings ended with specific action items. People knew what they were supposed to do.

Carmen Segarra: None of that happens at the Fed. It's like the information is discussed, and then it just ends up in like a vacuum floating on air, not acted upon. And the mere act of having this meeting, for them, is almost like akin to having done something about it.

You can read more about Segarra and also about George Packer in this week's Weekend Read.

Jeremy Waldron in the NY Review of Books raises important questions about the "libertarian paternalism" of nudging as social policy. Nudging is the idea that government encourages healthy or rational behavior not by commanding it but by changing default choices. Instead of banning large sugary drinks, for example, the government could require that restaurants serve diet soda in medium cups unless the customer expressly asks for a large sugary drink. Customers remain free to fill themselves with sugar, but, nudged by the default choice, more customers will consume less. Waldron admits such nudging helps many live healthier. But he worries: "I am afraid there is very little awareness in these books about the problem of trust. Every day we are bombarded with offers whose choice architecture is manipulated, not necessarily in our favor. The latest deal from the phone company is designed to bamboozle us, and we may well want such blandishments regulated. But it is not clear whether the regulators themselves are trustworthy. Governments don't just make mistakes; they sometimes set out deliberately to mislead us. The mendacity of elected officials is legendary, and claims on our trust and credulity have often been squandered. It is against this background that we have to consider how nudging might be abused. There are deeper questions, too, than these issues of trust and competence. As befits someone who was 'regulation czar' in the Obama White House, Sunstein's point of view is a rather lofty one and at times it has an uncomfortable affinity with what Bernard Williams once called 'Government House utilitarianism.' Government House utilitarianism was a moral philosophy that envisaged an elite who knew the moral truth and could put out simple rules for the natives (or ordinary people) to use, even though in the commissioner's bungalow it was known that the use of these rules would not always be justified. We (the governors) know that lying, for example, is sometimes justified, but we don't want to let on to the natives, who may not have the wit to figure out when this is so; we don't trust them to make the calculations that we make about when the ordinary rules should not be followed. Williams saw the element of insult in this sort of approach to morality, and I think it is discernable in Sunstein's nudging as well."

In an interview, Hillary Mantel compares Thomas Cromwell, the subject of her books Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, and Margaret Thatcher, the subject of the only new story in a collection that's about to be released: "Creativity in politics is rare but I think she had it... Cromwell did too. But there are big differences. He was a negotiator and she detested consensus-she saw herself as an Old Testament prophet delivering the truth from on high. Cromwell used history to pretend the new things he was doing were old and thus to soothe the English temperament. Mrs. Thatcher despised history as a constraint."

In a survey of the state of the essay about research into the relationship between madness and creativity, Tom Bartlett suggests that maybe we want our artists to suffer a little bit: "The depressed writer is a stock character, like the ditzy cheerleader or the slick salesman. It's something we believe almost without thinking about it, in part because that pathetic figure so frequently appears in books and movies, and because we can point to historical examples of artists plagued by mental illness. John Berryman leapt from a bridge. Virginia Woolf walked into a river. David Foster Wallace, a fairly new addition to this sad list, hung himself. We mull the meaning of their deaths, divine clues from the works they left behind. We do the same with other artists. After Robin Williams's recent suicide came the predictable musings about whether his comedic brilliance was fueled by his apparent depression. Was his manic humor a tool to keep the darkness at bay? Our readiness to accept the connection between mental illness and creativity makes Andreasen's research all the more palatable: It is approval from on high of what we already feel in our guts. Perhaps it's perversely comforting to us nongeniuses that artists, in a sense, pay dearly for their cultural accomplishments. Maybe you'll never produce a great American anything but at least you're not nuts. At the same time, it's nice to think that the mentally ill harbor some special skill, and to argue otherwise seems unkind."

Hannah Arendt's call to think without banisters has captured the imagination of political thinkers. Within a symposium on Tracy Strong's important book Politics Without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century, Patchen Markell offers a definition of thinking without a banister: "I'll begin with a terminological question: What are 'visions' and 'banisters,' exactly? Often, Strong's uses of these terms, and especially the latter, seem to refer to what we used to call 'epistemological foundations.' He begins his book by saying that the phrase 'thinking without a banister,' for Arendt, 'meant for her that humans no longer could rely on any transcendental grounding to finalize their thinking' (1, emphasis added). What this amounts to is the idea that action cannot be underwritten by 'complete' knowledge of the world, not because there are things we should know but cannot, but because 'human understanding [is] not exhausted in the act of knowing.' Absent the banister of knowledge, we are compelled to relate to the world aesthetically, which means we acknowledge the 'presence of the incomprehensible' and, consequently, we recognize that 'what one says about it is necessarily in and only in one's own voice,' a recognition that 'necessarily opens and relates one to others making a judgment of their own' (13). What sets Strong's authors off from the tradition that precedes them, it seems, is that all take up the challenge of thinking without banisters in this sense, radicalizing Kant's critique of knowledge under the weight of their anticipation or experience of the horrors of the twentieth century." The Symposium has essays by Markell, Linda Zerelli, Mary Dietz, and a response by Tracy Strong. The entire symposium can be found in the journal Political Theory.

In a profile of Bard College president Leon Botstein, Alice Gregory reveals the sound and fury that he finds necessary to running a small liberal arts college with relatively few resources (the Arendt Center is housed at Bard). In Botstein's case, it often means taking risks and fostering innovation with the faith that the funding will follow. Gregory suggests that the key to Bard's recent success is a series of attempts at revising the traditions of secondary education, specifically mentioning the college's revolutionary programs in prisons, it's acclaimed high school early college programs, and its innovative ways of admitting new students. People ask how Botstein does so much with so little. Gregory writes that Botstein turns the question around: "Botstein, who has accused other college presidents of doing nothing more than 'running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel,' seems genuinely baffled by what he sees as the financial conservatism of most well-endowed liberal-arts schools. 'I'm a little mystified about what they do with their money,' he said." For Gregory, Botstein has created Bard in his "polymath image": "Classes are small and seminar style. Freshmen arrive on campus three weeks before the fall semester starts, not to river-raft or play getting-to-know-you games but to study philosophy, literature, and religious texts for five hours a day. In January, they are required to stay on campus and work in science labs. Unlike many colleges today, Bard still has distribution requirements. Before declaring a major, sophomores must present and defend papers before a board of professors. All seniors must write theses.The school remains small-there are fewer than two thousand students-and resources are scarce. But Botstein has built Bard, which saw a thirty-per-cent increase in applications this year, into an academic center that punches far above its weight."

This week on the Blog, Anne O'Byrne discusses Arendt's reaction to a Matisse exhibition and what "stripping away the face" means for our humanness in the Quote of the Week. Athenian historian Thucydides provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on a 2010 Lunchtime Talk with Bill Dixon on a new critique of globalization in our Video Archives. In our Library feature, we discover a Bible in Hannah Arendt's library and wonder whether she herself owned it. And Roger Berkowitz discusses Carmen Segarra and the "unwinding" of America in the Weekend Read.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

John Jeremiah Sullivan tells a tale of the anxieties and rare talents of Donald Antrim. At one point he recounts the story of Antrim's battles with mental illness and Antrim's decision to check himself into a psychiatric hospital. His doctors said: "'You're very sick, and you're very psychotic, and we can take care of you.' They told him they wanted him to undergo electroconvulsive therapy. He could take time to think about it. A nurse led him back into the hallway and down to his room. The news destroyed him. Not because he didn't believe them, that it was the best thing for him, nor even because he feared the procedure itself (though naturally it terrified him to face it), but because he believed it would mean the end of him as a writer. That his talent would be scattered. His brains scrambled. The mechanism disassembled. Not to write? A living death. What would it even mean to go about your day? Also he felt that it was, he said, 'a confirmation that I would never leave hospitals.' He sat down on a chair. 'Not 20 minutes later,' he said, 'a patient called out, "Mr. Antrim,­ there's a phone call for you."' He shuffled down to the phones near the medication dispensary. He picked up. 'Donald,' a voice said, 'this is Dave Wallace. I heard you were in bad shape....' Wallace, who had undergone the procedure himself, spent at least an hour telling Antrim that he shouldn't be afraid, that he would still be there when it was over, that it would still be there."

We live in a time dominated by the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, the idea that one aspect of a person's life dominates the whole. Thus someone who has strong faith in God is dismissed as a fundamentalist just as someone who opposes the wearing of Burqas in public is labeled an Islamophobe and those who oppose Israel are called antisemites. In each of these instances, one opinion or quality of the person is used to devalue the entirety of their persona, as if to hold an offensive opinion makes one offensive. There are few opinions that are considered to disqualify one for good society more than to be a Nazi, which is why the publication of Martin Heidegger's Black Notebooks has unleashed a frenzy of self-satisfied accusation. In two recent reviews, Gregory Fried in the LA Review of Books and Peter Gordon in the New York Review of Books each make obligatory statements that the Notebooks prove Heidegger was a Nazi. But each also makes the effort then to ask what that means, to understand Heidegger's fully atypical and metaphysical Nazism. Here is Fried: "For one thing, the Notebooks show that the Nazi revolution was only an opportunity for Heidegger, a moment when the overturning might be possible, not guaranteed. He was proud enough to think he could become the leader in spirit of this movement, as Marx was to Communism, but the movement failed him and the historical rupture it should have served, not the other way around. Furthermore, Communism itself was, for Heidegger, just another form of Platonism. Much like the Christian end-times and apocalypse, Communism promises an end of history, a complete fulfillment of human destiny. Platonism in all its forms, according to Heidegger, explains what it means to be human as something grounded in a timeless realm beyond history that applies universally to all human beings, whether as created in God's image, or as bearers of human rights that apply to 'all men' - as the American Declaration would have it - or as participants in Communism's world revolution that would put an end to the question of what humanity has been and will become. To all such movements Heidegger applies the name 'liberalism,' not in the parochial, contemporary sense of modern welfare liberalism, but rather in a sense that reaches back to Plato and that defines human 'liberty' on the basis of an appeal to timeless and universal truths. In the Nazis, Heidegger thought he had found a movement that would reject universalistic liberalism in all its forms - Christianity, the secular Enlightenment, Communism - in favor of a politics that would root human history in the communal belonging of a finite historical people. By the end, though, the Notebooks show Heidegger accusing Nazism itself of falling prey to liberalism through its metaphysical reduction of all human differences to race, its treating the Volk as kind of super-subject akin to conventional liberalism's subjective individual, and its capitulation to the idols of machination and gigantism.... The promise of the Nazi revolution had devolved, for Heidegger, into a kitschy mish-mash of blood-and-soil myth-making, its followers qualified only by their willingness not to think or to question the meaning of modernity." You can view a discussion between Roger Berkowitz and Peter Trawny, the translator of the Black Notebooks, here.

Peter Gordon also makes an effort to explore the depths and not simply the fact of Heidegger's Nazism: "As rector he tried to resist 'vulgar National Socialism.' He knew that Nazism was a concatenation of competing ideologies, and he expressed both resentment at his rivals and fear that the ascendant language of allegedly scientific racism would mislead the German people from its true historical mission. Although he grasped at the official jargon of 'blood and soil,' he eschewed 'dull biologism' because he felt it wrongly applied the schema of the natural sciences to human existence, as if the entire 'intellectual-historical world' grew in a 'plantlike' fashion from the body of the Volk. In April 1934, Heidegger tendered his resignation as rector. The details of his career have received ample documentation, notably in the scrupulous historical study by Hugo Ott. But the notebooks give us a fuller picture of Heidegger's personal disappointment. On April 28 he made sketches for a farewell address, desperately seeking a higher significance for the 'wrecked year.' The failure was not his alone, he wrote, and perhaps it was not a failure at all, since wreckage itself was 'the highest form of human experience, in which we meet with the effective world-powers in their merciless efficacy.' Failure or not, from this point onward the notebooks assume a tone of marked bitterness. Everywhere he saw only 'rushers and alarmists, makers and strivers.' By the summer of 1936 Heidegger was under surveillance, and although he continued to nourish hopes for Germany's political future, his own chances for a career as a public official of the Third Reich began to dwindle." You can view a discussion between Roger Berkowitz and Peter Trawny, the translator of the Black Notebooks, here.

Robert Darnton wonders at the relationship between author and censor: "When exiles from the Soviet system invoked 'freedom' and 'truth,' they were not appealing to the protection of the First Amendment or speaking as philosophers. They were using words to describe their experience of censorship as a force operating in specific circumstances, a force that determined the nature of literature in an oppressive political system. 'Freedom of speech' served as a standard against which to measure the oppression. It did not apply to constraints of all kinds, although many kinds had weighed on the lives of the writers. Freedom for them was a principle made meaningful by the experience of its violation. Experiences varied, of course, and the variations make it hopeless to search for a general proposition that would encompass all of them, including some that have been studied up close, such as censorship under apartheid in South Africa. They also understood that literature in what Westerners called the 'free world' suffered from constraints. Does their experience argue for a relativistic notion of freedom?"

In an interview, Richard Rodriguez describes his writing life: "My own writing life is as predictable as the old priest preparing to say the dawn mass. The pleasant cold, the mild pain of being alive. I have the same breakfast every day-cold cereal, yogurt, coffee. I read the newspapers. I take a fistful of vitamins. I shower. I linger at my bookshelf or at the window. I read a chapter or a poem from a shelf I keep above my desk of former lovers and seducers, impossible rivals-Nabokov or Lawrence, Larkin. Woolf. Sitting down at the computer is as daunting as the altar boy's first genuflection. Aquinas described writing as a form of prayer. Writing is for me dishearteningly hermetic. Revision is writing. Revision is humiliation-Tuesday saying something less well than Monday. Revision is open to noticing connections. Revision is joy at precisely that moment when the sentence no longer seems mine but speaks back to me and haughtily resists further revision. I read in the afternoons. I take long walks. I watch TV in the evening. I write letters at all times." Richard Rodriguez gave the keynote lecture at the 2013 Hannah Arendt Center Conference. Revisit it here.

Jake Flanagan offers a cautionary tale of internet deception on Facebook. "Zilla van der Born, a Dutch national, spent five weeks traveling through Southeast Asia and documented the trip in photos on Facebook. She posed for pictures while dining on dumplings, snorkeling among colorful fish in azure waters and visiting ornately decorated Buddhist temples - compiling the lot into a series of videos for her Vimeo account. All in all, Ms. van der Born seemed to have enjoyed a busy, albeit conventional, trip to Phuket, Luang Prabang or some other regional tourist hub. Or so it would appear. In reality, Ms. van der Born never left her home city, Amsterdam. Each photograph was expertly contrived.... The ultimate goal was to 'prove how easy it is to distort reality,' she said. 'Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.'"

This week on the Blog, Laurie Naranch discusses Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt's shared investment in literary pearls, fragments, and moments in the Quote of the Week. French dramatist Jean Racine provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on Roger Hodge's talk "Alchemies of Deception" for our 2011 conference in our Video Archives. In our Library feature, we admire Arendt's impressive collection of Kant's writings. And Roger Berkowitz reflects on American exceptionalism and its decline in the Weekend Read.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Monday, October 15, 2012: “The Destiny of Freedom: From Kant to Heidegger”

Participants: Philippe Nonet, a professor at U.C. Berkeley who holds a Doctor of Laws and a Ph.D. in Sociology

In his lecture at Bard College, Philippe Nonet traces a history of metaphysical freedom from Kant to Heidegger, touching on Nietzsche and, in the end, elaborating on a view of freedom oriented towards the future of humanity. An edited version of Professor Nonet’s lecture appears in Volume 2 of HA: the Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Order it here.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Robert Bernasconi challenges the defense of enlightenment philosophers who supported or defended race based slavery in their writings and raises questions about how racism infects their philosophy. In this lecture, he aims to implicate John Locke and Immanuel Kant in the development and propagation of an idea of race as an absolutizing, essentializing concept that motivates racism and racial slavery.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

In the New York Review of Books, Sue Halpern argues that we should pay less attention to the character of actors like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald and focus more on the governmental actions they have revealed. Yet much if not most of Halpern’s essay focuses on Snowden and Greenwald themselves, and the paragraph that stands out in Halpern’s essay goes directly to Snowden’s decision to leave the country and evade confronting the U.S. Government in court:

It is here that Edward Snowden’s story begins to sound much like those of Thomas Drake, William Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Edward Loomis, longtime NSA employees who, a few years earlier than Snowden, attempted to raise concerns with their superiors—only to find themselves rebuffed—about what they perceived to be NSA overreach and illegality when they learned that the agency was indiscriminately monitoring the communications of American citizens without warrants. Binney, Wiebe, and Loomis resigned—and later found themselves the subjects of FBI interrogations. Drake, however, stayed on and brought his suspicions to the office of general counsel for the NSA, where he was told: “Don’t ask any more questions, Mr. Drake.” Frustrated, Drake eventually leaked what he knew to a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. The upshot: a home invasion by the FBI, a federal indictment, and the threat of thirty-five years in prison for being in possession of classified documents that, when he obtained them, had not been classified. After years of harassment by the government and Drake’s financial ruin, the case was dropped the night before trial. It was against this backdrop that Snowden found himself contemplating what to do with what he knew. Stymied by an unresponsive bureaucracy, seeing the fate of earlier NSA whistleblowers, and finding no adequate provisions within the system to challenge the legality of government activity if that activity was considered by the government to touch on national security, he nonetheless set about gathering the evidence to make his case.

For those who would defend Snowden, this narrative is essential. The claim is that the United States now is simply not like the United States of the 1960s and 1970s when Daniel Ellsberg gave himself up after releasing the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg himself has made this argument while defending Snowden, arguing that Snowden and whistleblowers like him simply cannot and should not trust the U.S. government to treat them legally and humanely.

Roger Berkowitz is Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College, and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. He is also the author of "Gift of Science: Leibiniz and the Modern Legal Tradition", as well as co-editor of "Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics".

“The inner I: That I of reflection is the self, a reflection of the appearing human, so mortal, finite, growing old, capable of change, etc. On the other hand, the I of apperception, the thinking I, which does not change and is timeless. (Kafka Parable)”

—Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, February 1966

In an age overcome with the reach of globalization and the virtual expanse of the Internet, Arendt’s notes in her Denktagebuch on a seemingly obscure technical question on activity of thought in Kant gain new relevance by differentiating modes of thinking with depth and over time. Her reference to Kafka and the form of the entry pushes her profound temporal ideas in the direction of narrative fiction.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

"Thinking in its non-cognitive, non-specialized sense as a natural need of human life, the actualization of the difference given in consciousness, is not a prerogative of the few but an everpresent faculty of everybody; by the same token, inability to think is not the “prerogative” of those many who lack brain power but the everpresent possibility for everybody—scientists, scholars, and other specialists in mental enterprises not excluded—to shun that intercourse with oneself whose possibility and importance Socrates first discovered."

Published eight years after Eichmann in Jerusalem, “Thinking and Moral Considerations” is Arendt’s elaboration of her argument in that book that Adolf Eichmann’s criminal role in the Holocaust did not originate from any “base motives” or even from any motives at all, but from his “thoughtlessness” or “inability to think.” If, she asks, Eichmann’s crimes, which he committed over the course of years, resulted from the fact that he never paused to think, what exactly does it mean to think, and what is the relation between thinking and morality?

In the above quote, which appears on the penultimate page of the lecture, Arendt defines thinking—or the kind of thinking that she argues is necessary for morality—as “the actualization of the difference given in consciousness,” as “that intercourse with oneself whose possibility and importance Socrates first discovered.” She describes this “non-cognitive, non-specialized” kind of thinking both as “a natural need of human life” and as “an everpresent faculty of everybody.” By contrast, she defines “inability to think” as the everpresent possibility for everybody to shun thinking.

We might wonder at this point why Arendt does not simply speak of an “ability not to think,” an ability to (actively) shun thinking, rather than an “inability to think.” Is this because she wants to maintain a hierarchy between something that is natural and human (thinking) and something that is unnatural and inhuman (not thinking)? What would be the justification for such a hierarchy? Or does she want to suggest that Eichmann has become unable to think (through barbarous “nurture”), losing touch with his (nevertheless everpresent) faculty of thinking, which everybody has from birth (“nature”) or from the moment they learn to speak? Thinking and language are intrinsically connected from the first page of Arendt’s lecture, where the primary evidence of Eichmann’s inability to think is that he speaks in clichés. (Also, the lecture is dedicated to a poet, W.H. Auden.) Finally, how does Arendt’s description of thinking as a “natural need of human life” relate to her suggestion that Socrates did not merely discover the importance but the very possibility of thinking?

Arendt casts Socrates as “a model, (…) an example that, unlike the ‘professional’ thinkers, could be representative for our ‘everybody,’ (…) a man who counted himself neither among the many nor among the few (…).” She takes Socrates not as “a personified abstraction with some allegorical meaning ascribed to it,” but as an “ideal type” who “was chosen out of the crowd of living beings, in the past or the present, because he possessed a representative significance in reality which only needed some purification in order to reveal its full meaning.” What, then, is this representative significance?

Arendt bases her conception of thinking and its relation to morality primarily on two famous propositions that Socrates puts forward in the Gorgias: “It is better to be wronged than to do wrong,” and “It would be better for me that my lyre or a chorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me” (Arendt’s emphases). According to Arendt, these propositions are not primarily “cogitations about morality” but “insights of experience,” of the experience of the process of thinking. Arendt claims that Socrates means by the first proposition that it is better for him to be wronged than to do wrong if he is thinking, because in thinking you are carrying on a dialogue with yourself, which presupposes some friendship between the partners in the thinking dialogue. You would not want to be friends and enter into a dialogue with someone who does wrong, and since Socrates presupposes that the unexamined life is not worth living, doing wrong leads to a life that is not worth living because examining it in thinking is no longer possible.

Arendt argues that conscience is a “by-product” of consciousness, of the actualization of the difference of me and myself in thinking, because: “What makes a man fear his conscience is the anticipation of the presence of a witness who awaits him only if and when he goes home” (Arendt’s emphasis). However, this formulation suggests that there is no reason to fear your conscience if you never go “home,” that is, if you never engage in the activity of thinking, which, according to Arendt, was precisely Eichmann’s problem. What, then, determines whether someone uses her faculty of thinking or realizes the everpresent possibility of not thinking?

Alfredo Jaar's "The Geometry of Conscience"

Arendt’s lecture does not contain a strong answer to this question. But although the relation between phenomenological description and normative argument in this lecture remains somewhat unclear, the lecture seems to contain a defense of thinking and a “demand” that everybody think, that everybody aspire to some extent to the ideal-type represented by Socrates, because only thinking can provide an antidote to the “banality of evil.” Arendt acknowledges that thinking can lead to license, cynicism, and nihilism through the relativizing of existing values, because “all critical examinations must go through a stage of at least hypothetically negating accepted opinions and ‘values’ by finding out their implications and tacit assumptions.” However, Arendt’s anti-elitist suggestion is that the problem of nihilism is never that too many people think or that people think too much, but rather that people do not think enough.

Yet Arendt does not tell us what would promote thinking. She does not propose, for instance, to generalize the teaching of thinking through educational institutions, the way that Adorno proposed to create “mobile educational groups” of volunteers to teach “critical (…) self-reflection” to everybody, in his 1966 radio talk, “Education After Auschwitz.” A Habermasian model where people become critical through participation in democratic politics is unavailable for Arendt given her strong opposition of thinking to politics, which belongs to the realm of action. What Arendt does tell us is what is conducive to actualizing the everpresent possibility of notthinking: “(…) general rules which can be taught and learned until they grow into habits that can be replaced by other habits and rules,” the way that Eichmann, as Arendt argues in Eichmann in Jerusalem, simply substituted the duty to do the Führer’s will for Kant’s categorical imperative.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

When we quote someone, we often seem to do so in order to appeal to some kind of authority. We use a statement of Arendt, for instance, in order to shed light on a contemporary event or phenomenon that calls for our attention. We consider her as a “theorist” who supposedly has “relevant” things to say that may help us “solve” a contemporary problem of understanding. We ask ourselves: “What would Hannah Arendt say?”

For several reasons, however, this practice is problematic. Firstly, as Arendt herself repeatedly insisted, thinking, understood as the never-ending attempt to make sense of events, experiences, and phenomena that occur, is an activity that we can only perform for and by ourselves. Secondly, by “applying” an authoritative “theory” to concrete events, we run the risk of explaining them away, rather than to “save the phenomena” in their concrete particularity. Finally, we run the risk of doing injustice to the “authority” in question. Arendt’s work is much too multi-vocal and perspectival for it to be reduced to a bag of “relevant” propositions that we can use at will. Much of what she says is more complicated and puzzling than it may seem, and requires a serious and sustained effort of interpretation. “Results” are by no means guaranteed. In this sense, the self-evident practice of quoting her every week entails the risk that she becomes all-too-familiar to us, that she is turned into someone whose “convictions” we no longer question, but complacently apply.

The use of Arendt as an authority becomes especially problematic when she is read in what could be called a “pessimistic” or “nostalgic” way, as if the most important thing that we can learn from her consists in a “diagnosis” of “our time”, which entails the claim that politics has been “lost”, that culture and education are in “crisis”, etc. By reading her this way, we run the risk of reinforcing an “objectifying” picture of our contemporary situation, as if the terms “loss” and “crisis” refer to objective facts that are “out there”, rather than to conceptual interventions that may (and perhaps should) invite our own counter-interventions. What is more, we run the risk of placing ourselves on the side of the few who really “got it”, against the many who still do not get it and will perhaps never get it, lest they start reading – and quoting – Arendt.

This is not to say that there is no basis at all in her work for reading her like this, but it is at odds with what may be considered as a more promising and liberating reading – a reading which invites us to begin something new, both in thinking and by acting, however difficult this may seem to be. Invoking Arendt as an authority, by contrast, may precisely serve as a substitute for thinking, rather than as its starting point.

By taking as our starting point a quote about quoting, we hope to make the practice of quoting Arendt into something uncommon, something unfamiliar. The quote in question, cited above, is a singular entry from Arendt’s Denktagebuch, the “thinking diary” that she kept from the early fifties until a few years before her death, and which she never intended for publication. The sentence is from November 1969, when she was working on what would become the first volume of The Life of the Mind, called Thinking, in which she addresses the question, what are we “doing” when we do nothing but think.

The meaning of the sentence – perhaps “meditation” is a better term – is by no means easy to grasp. It appears as a moment of self-reflection, a moment in which she stops, steps back, and thinks about the very thing she has been doing in her notebook: to interpret, to quote. It almost reads as a warning: make sure you consider these interpretations and quotations only as witnesses [Zeugen], also friends [Freunde], rather than as – we are tempted to add – authoritative statements, or – to borrow a phrase from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own – nuggets of pure truth to keep between the pages of your notebook and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

What does it mean to consider the practice of “interpreting, quoting” as a means to have “witnesses, also friends”? In the entry that immediately follows, Arendt uses the word “friend” twice: “Thought speaks with itself (as with a friend)…” and “In thought, the self is a friend…” Only two entries earlier, she had written that critical thinking consists in a giving-of-account [Rechenschaft geben] in a dialogue with oneself. She cites Kant as the genuine representative of this form of thinking, who had distinguished the quaestio facti – how one comes in possession of a specific concept, or what the origin of a specific term is – from the quaestio juris – with what right one possesses and makes use of a specific concept.

The process of a giving-of-account in this latter sense requires that you are friends with yourself. If there is too much distance, you do no longer talk with yourself, and the inner dialogue comes to an end. Yet the activity of talking something through also comes to an end when there is not enough distance, when you do no longer disagree with yourself at all. As Arendt writes earlier in her notebook: “Only because I can speak with others, can I also speak with myself, i.e., think. Ergo: Aristotle is not right: A friend is not “another self”, rather, the self is another friend.”

Perhaps it is here that we should bring the notion of a “witness” into play. The figure of a witness may be described as someone who testifies to an event that is beyond our own immediate experience, something we were not there to see with our own eyes, perhaps something unheard of. In the entry on critical thinking mentioned above, Arendt notes that our conscience finds its origin in our activity of thinking in the sense of a giving-of-account of something, in a dialogue with ourselves. In another Denktagebuch-entry, written in December 1969, so one month later, she uses the notion of a witness precisely in the context of explaining the workings of our conscience. When our conscience speaks, it serves as our inner witness by reminding us of something we did, and in calling us to account for it. Obviously, the point here is not that we were not present at the actual event, but that we do not want to hear about it anymore.

In the context of our quotation, we may say that a witness confronts us with a certain perspective on our conception of a certain event or experience, perhaps a strange or unsuspected one. Thereby, he or she invites us to give account of our own convictions and interpretations. However, the addition “also friends” is required: only if we approach a witness as a friend – a friendly interlocutor – will the thinking dialogue actually come to pass, will we start thinking something through.

By quoting, we may now suggest, we invoke a testimony by someone who calls us into thinking. By interpreting a quotation, we may add, we gain the opportunity to think something through by and for ourselves, rather than to use it as a means of adding authority to our already existing convictions and interpretations or to use the “answers” it contains in order to “solve” our problems for us. Or, in the words of Walter Benjamin, as quoted by Arendt in her essay on him: “Quotations … are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieves an idler of his convictions.”

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Action is “the miracle that saves the world from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin.”

-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

“I mentioned the quality of being a person as distinguished from being mere human..., and I said that to speak about a moral personality is almost redundancy...In the process of thought in which I actualize the specifically human difference of speech I explicitly constitute myself a person, and I shall remain one to the extent that I am capable of such constitution ever again and anew.”

-Hannah Arendt, "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy"

We are used to finding in Arendt’s work a clear distinction between action and speech on the one hand and thinking and judging on the other. But here in the second quote, Arendt declares that only this thinking through and - qualified - speech can transform a mere human being into a personality.

Now, when, as Arendt writes in the first quote, the miracle of action saves the world from its normal‚ 'natural’ ruin, defining nature as non-civilization, as barbarity, then this means that such an action is insolubly connected to the question of the personality of those who act. Who are those who acted in Occupy Now! or joined Los Indignados in Spain: were they individuals in the literal sense of independent human beings as the smallest units, which change sometimes rapidly into parts of masses, or were they persons, personalities? This question is much more important than the question of political goals or theoretical programs. Because it depends on those, who act, whether the world can be saved from its neo-liberal ruin and if yes, how.

The distinction between individuals and personalities always has an elitist appearance. But it is evident that we find personalities independent of their social status among workers, academics and politicians. A personality is not formed by its social origin or intellectual Bildung, but by a practical everyday education of citizens. This education is not based on the separation of reason and emotion, but on that what Arendt referred to as the “understanding heart” of the biblical King Solomon, which comprises equally heart and mind. The European 18th century, facing a secular society increasingly oriented towards an open freedom, searched for the possibility of a self-bound orientation in judgment. It discussed taste as a power of cognition. Melchior Grimm for example, a more or less forgotten German illustrator, essayist and diplomat, wrote: “The condition of a pronounced and perfect taste is to have a sharp intellect, a sensitive soul and a righteous heart.” Here taste does not only mean the aesthetic but also the moral judgment. In Grimm’s trilogy all three elements are indispensible in their mutual conditionality: reason can become inhuman without soul and heart; the sensitive soul apolitical due to an unchecked compassion; the righteous heart confused without reason.

Back then there was a prevailing understanding that moral and artistic quality rest in equal measure on independent thinking and on independent judgment. This is still visible in our everyday use of language whenever we speak of a “beautiful” or “ugly” gesture or figure of speech or of the “inner beauty” which a person possessing integrity shows by that integrity. These examples are, according to Kant, expressions of the harmony of the different powers of cognition both in regards to their inner proportions and in respect to the free coexistence of these powers and their mutual influence on one another. It is a harmony which occurs between form and content as well as between “an enlarged mentality” and reason, it differs from purely rational judgment.

Therefore, it is not the reason, which we are proud of because it distinguishes us from animals, but rather what Arendt calls an enlarged mentality which is of decisive political importance. In her Denktagebuch (Thinking Diary) she wrote: “Because of the fact that not self-bound reason but only an enlarged mentality makes it possible ‘to think in the place of another’, it is not reason, but the enlarged mentality which forms the link between human beings. Against the sense of self fueled by reason, by the I-think, one finds a sense for the world, fueled by the others as common-sense (passive) and the enlarged mentality (active.)”

From this interpersonal perspective follows the aspect that freedom is to be understood as “freedom for,” as inter-subjective, common freedom, which is inseparably bound to the responsibility for everything that happens in the political community. This responsibility does not deal with moral or juridical guilt for one’s own actions but instead with the responsibility of someone who is “a responder,” who understands that the actions of all decide whether or not we live in a decent society.

Though with Kant the era of investigations into the conditions for an independent judgment ended and the Kantian “capacity to judge” was replaced during the 19th and 20th centuries by logic, ideologies and theoretical systems, there were still some ambassadors of the 18th century left – Arendt of course, and her contemporaries like George Orwell and Albert Camus. Orwell’s works are marked by a hypothesis; namely, that the decency inherent in the everyday life of normal people can resist the general loss of orientation in an age of ideology. “It looks like a platitude,” he wrote, but his message was nothing more than: “If men would behave decently the world would be decent.” He tried to interpret what he called the “common decency” as a compass not only of single persons but also of the social and political life of citizens. According to Orwell this common decency rests on general, practical everyday moral norms and habits. Common decency differs from explicit and rigid moral prescriptions of “the good human being” by its openness and flexibility. For Orwell it was not human dignity in an abstract way that had to be protected but the behaviour to which a society commits itself that was in need of defending. The decent life affords social regulations that consist of respect for others, the absence of domination or humiliation, and social, economic or cultural equality. The highest income should not be ten times higher than the lowest. All laws should respect or support a decent life and include all citizens in the “pouvoir constituant des vie ordinaries.” Orwell was against the socialism of his time as an oligarchic collectivism, which attracted only the socially marginalized and intellectuals. “In our country,” he wrote, “the liberals fear freedom and the intellectuals are ready for any sort of ignominy against thinking.” That means: “The direct conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.”

This aspect of decency refers to what for Arendt is the basis of all political action and independent judgment; the effort to recover in a political community the right middle ground and human scale that marks the place where civilization ends.

Like Arendt and Orwell, Albert Camus stressed the importance of moderation while he observed excess among Marxist intellectuals after WW II, described in his most provocative book The Rebel. Revolutionary errors, he declared, disregarded natural limits and in so doing betrayed human inviolability. The experience of modern revolutions shows that “revolutions when they have no limits other than historical effectiveness, means endless slavery.” For Camus it is the task of revolt to redefine the place of the right middle and human scale in a permanent critical confrontation with present conditions.

Herein lays the actuality of these three authors, Arendt, Orwell and Camus: writing about totalitarianism, they described the conditions of a decent society, which was menaced then by revolutionary dogmatism and ideological mass-movements, and which is menaced today - not by revolts, or mass protests - but quite the contrary, by the destruction of politics and the common good by neo-liberalism.

Therefore, it is not by chance that Arendt in her portraits of writers, politicians and thinkers, which she wrote on various occasions and published in her book Men in dark Times, always came to speak about their personal qualities. For example, Lessing’s critical mentality which could “never give rise to a definite worldview which, once adopted, is immune to further experiences in the world because it has hitched itself firmly to one possible perspective”; Rosa Luxemburg’s cultural background of an assimilated Jewish life in Poland characterized by excellent literary taste, independent moral concepts and the absence of social prejudices, and Waldemar Gurian’s independent judgment and non-conformism – he was her friend and the dean of the University of Notre Dame - who “was delighted when he could break down the(se) barriers of so-called civilized society, because he saw in them barriers between human souls.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

It can be dangerous to tell the truth: “There will always be One against All, one person against all others. [This is so] not because One is terribly wise and All are terribly foolish, but because the process of thinking and researching, which finally yields truth, can only be accomplished by an individual person. In its singularity or duality, one human being seeks and finds – not the truth (Lessing) –, but some truth.”

-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, Book XXIV, No. 21

Hannah Arendt wrote these lines when she was confronted with the severe and often unfair, even slanderous, public criticism launched against her and her book Eichmann in Jerusalemafter its publication in 1963. The quote points to her understanding of the thinking I (as opposed to the acting We) on which she bases her moral and, partly, her political philosophy.

It is the thinking I, defined with Kant as selbstdenkend (self-thinking [“singularity”]) and an-der-Stelle-jedes-andern-denkend (i.e., in Arendt’s terms, thinking representatively or practicing the two-in-one [“duality”]). Her words also hint at an essay she published in 1967 titled “Truth and Politics,” wherein she takes up the idea that it is dangerous to tell the truth, factual truth in particular, and considers the teller of factual truth to be powerless. Logically, the All are the powerful, because they may determine what at a specific place and time is considered to be factual truth; their lies, in the guise of truth, constitute reality. Thus, it is extremely hard to fight them.

In answer to questions posed in 1963 by the journalist Samuel Grafton regarding her report on Eichmann and published only recently, Arendt states: “Once I wrote, I was bound to tell the truth as I see it.” The statement reveals that she was quite well aware of the fact that her story, i.e., the result of her own thinking and researching, was only one among others. She also realized the lack of understanding and, in many cases, of thinking and researching, on the part of her critics.

Thus, she lost any hope of being able to publicly debate her position in a “real controversy,” as she wrote to Rabbi Hertzberg (April 8, 1966). By the same token, she determined that she would not entertain her critics, as Socrates did the Athenians: “Don’t be offended at my telling you the truth.” Reminded of this quote from Plato’s Apology (31e) in a supportive letter from her friend Helen Wolff, she acknowledged the reference, but acted differently. After having made up her mind, she wrote to Mary McCarthy: “I am convinced that I should not answer individual critics. I probably shall finally make, not an answer, but a kind of evaluation of this whole strange business.” In other words, she did not defend herself in following the motto “One against All,” which she had perceived and noted in her Denktagebuch. Rather, as announced to McCarthy, she provided an “evaluation” in the 1964 preface to the German edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem and later when revising that preface for the postscript of the second English edition.

Arendt also refused to act in accordance with the old saying: Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus(let there be justice, though the world perish). She writes – in the note of the Denktagebuchfrom which today’s quote is taken – that such acting would reveal the courage of the teller of truth “or, perhaps, his stubbornness, but neither the truth of what he had to say nor even his own truthfulness.” Thus, she rejected an attitude known in German cultural tradition under the name of Michael Kohlhaas. A horse trader living in the 16th century, Kohlhaas became known for endlessly and in vain fighting injustice done to him (two of his horses were stolen on the order of a nobleman) and finally taking the law into his own hands by setting fire to houses in Wittenberg.

Even so, Arendt has been praised as a woman of “intellectual courage” with regard to her book on Eichmann (see Richard Bernstein’s contribution to Thinking in Dark Times).

Intellectual courage based on thinking and researching was rare in Arendt’s time and has become even rarer since then. But should Arendt therefore only matter nostalgicly? Certainly not. Her emphasis on the benefits of thinking as a solitary business still remains current. Consider, for example, the following reference to Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at MIT and author of the recent book Alone Together. In an interview with Peter Haffner (published on July 27, 2012, in SZ Magazin), she argues that individuals who become absorbed in digital communication lose crucial components of their faculty of thinking. Turkle says (my translation): Students who spend all their time and energy on communication via SMS, Facebook, etc. “can hardly concentrate on a particular subject. They have difficulty thinking a complex idea through to its end.” No doubt, this sounds familiar to all of us who know about Hannah Arendt’s effort to promote thinking (and judging) in order to make our world more human.

To return to today’s quote: It can be dangerous to tell the truth, but thinking is dangerous too. Once in a while, not only the teller of truth but the thinking 'I' as well may find himself or herself in the position of One against All.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

The jury trial is, as Alexis de Tocqueville understood, one essential incubator of American democracy. The jury trial is the only space in which most people will ever be forced to sit in judgment of their fellow citizens and declare them innocent or guilty; or, in a civil trial, to judge whether one party’s wrong requires compensation. The experience of being a juror, Tocqueville saw, inculcates in all citizens the habits of mind of the judge; it “spreads to all classes respect for the thing judged and the idea of right.” Juries, he wrote, are “one of the most efficacious means society can make use of for the education of the people.”

If the experience of sitting in judgment as a juror is a bulwark of our democratic freedoms, we should be worried. As Albert W. Dzur writes, the jury trial, once the “standard way Americans handled criminal cases,” is now largely absent from the legal system. The jury trial “has been supplanted by plea agreements, settlements, summary judgments, and other non-trial forums that are usually more efficient and cost-effective in the short term. In addition to cost and efficiency, justice officials worry about juror competence in the face of scientific and technical evidence and expert testimony, further diminishing the opportunity for everyday people to serve.”

Dzur offers a clear case for the disappearance of the jury trial:

[J]uries in the United States today hear a small fraction of cases. In 2005 the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that juries heard 4 percent of all alleged criminal offenses brought before federal courts. State courts match this trend. Legal scholars Brian J. Ostrom, Shauna M. Strickland, and Paula L. Hannaford-Agor discovered a 15 percent decline in total criminal jury trials in state courts over the last 30 years, compared with a 10 percent decline in criminal bench trials, in which a judge issues the verdict. They also found a 44 percent decline in civil jury trials compared with a 21 percent decline in civil bench trials.

So what does the retreat of Jury trials signify? For Dzur, the answer is that the jury system is an important part of our justice system because it performs a “constructive moral function,” by which he means that juries “force widespread sobriety about the real world of law and order.” Juries can challenge “official and lay attitudes regarding the law. This sobering quality of juries is particularly needed now.” Here is how Dzur characterizes more fully the “sobering quality of juries”:

A juror treats human beings attentively even while embedded within an institution that privileges rationalized procedures. Not advocates, prosecutors, or judges, jurors are independent of court processes and organizational norms while also being charged with judicial responsibility of the highest order. Their presence helps close the social distance between the parties and the court. The juror, who contributes to what is a political, juridical, and moral decision, becomes attuned to others in a way that triggers responsibility for them. Burns notes how jurors’ “intense encounter with the evidence” helps them engage in self-criticism of the “overgeneralized scripts” about crime and criminal offenders they may have brought with them into the courtroom.

In other words, juries are institutional spaces where citizens have the time to attentively consider fundamental moral and legal questions outside of the limelight and sequestered from public opinion, government pressure, and the media circus. Since juries are the institutions where we practice moral judgment, Dzur argues that the loss of juries means that “we are out of practice. Lay citizens no longer have opportunities to play decisive roles in our justice system.”

The recent jury decision in the George Zimmerman case is an example of a jury resisting popular calls for guilt and making a sober judgment that the facts of the case were simply not proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Juries can also resist the government, as might happen if Edward Snowden would return to the United States and put himself on trial before a jury. Such a jury could, and very well might, exonerate Snowden, exercising its fundamental right of jury nullification in the interest of justice. Snowden’s refusal to return is, in some part, a result of the diminished practice of moral judgment reflected in the diminishment of the jury.

Jury judgments are at times surprising and can, in extraordinary cases, go against the letter of the law. But the unpredictability of jury verdicts makes them neither irrational nor thoughtless. They are often intolerant and unfair, but this makes them neither racist nor unjust. Amidst the unquestioned hatred of all discrimination, we have forgotten that discrimination, the art of making relevant distinctions, is actually the root of judging. In our passion for rationality and fairness, we sacrifice judgment, and with judgment, we abandon our sense of justice.

What acts of judgment exemplified by juries offer are an ideal of justice beyond the law. Plato called it the idea of the good. Kant named it the categorical imperative. Arendt thought that judgment appealed to common sense, “that sense which fits us into a community with others.” What all three understood is that if morality and a life lived together with others is to persist, we need judgments that would invoke and actualize that common moral sense, that would keep alive the sense of justice.

Roger Berkowitz is Associate Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College, and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. He is also the author of "Gift of Science: Leibiniz and the Modern Legal Tradition", as well as co-editor of "Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics".